Crystal, Ronette, And Chiffon
by John Richards
Summary: Little Shop Of Horrors is Crystal, Ronette, and Chiffon telling the story of Seymour and Audrey. Here I tell the story of Crystal, Ronette, and Chiffon.
1. Crystal

"-should tell our story, warn them, warn them not to do what we did, what everybody did."

* * *

Crystal was never really completely comfortable in her own skin. She considered her name a mixed blessing – although she wouldn't call it that, because she didn't like to use the word "mixed". On the one hand, it firmly established her cultural identity before you even glanced at her, and, since she was proud of that identity, she liked that. On the other hand, have you ever seen a lower-case-c crystal? They're white. For many girls named Crystal living in Skid Row and similar areas, this fact was a simple little bit of irony. But for this particular Crystal, it was an uncomfortable reminder of the father she never saw and tried not to think about, the one who left her physically split between two different, conflicting racial identities, no matter how culturally she sided with one of them – the one without whom she couldn't exist and with whom she couldn't exist in a way she really liked. At least she didn't live in Baltimore, where segregation was still a thing. But then again, the people in Baltimore were dumb as shit anyway.

But whether or not she lived in Baltimore, Crystal was still secretly offended whenever anybody interacted with her, because she was never sure if anyone viewed her as lesser. The only exceptions were her two best friends, Ronette and Chiffon. But even then, her insecurity about what, exactly, she was, made her the aggressive one of the three - and that aggression was what left her where she was now. The three of them – Crystal, Ronette, and Chiffon – could all sing, and they could all sing fantastically. When Mushnik's Skid Row Florists – well, it was Mushnik and Son now – no, it was a WBE Superstore – got big, the world's spotlight came down on Skid Row. And that spotlight was the chance the three girls had been waiting for, to rise up and accomplish their dream of getting their music spread throughout America. And Crystal thought she would be happy. But she wasn't.

Because Ronette had always been the lead singer – and the leader of the three in general – it was no surprise that she was the focus in most of the tracks being recorded. Crystal had never minded, or even really thought about it, before. But in this studio, surrounded by old, rich, white men she'd never met before? Her mind began racing, considering the possible causes for this, and she was certain that she had been robbed in some way. Why wasn't she getting more vocal focus? Where were all the songs she wrote? And the songs that she did write – why was it Ronette singing them instead of her? So she snapped, and she began to rant. And rant. And rant. Her volume, and her tone of voice, and her throwing things scared the people around her, so she didn't really notice when they weren't reacting to her, but rather to something behind her. Eventually, she realized that something wasn't right, so she turned around, and there it was. An enormous, mobile, toothy Audrey II, filling the studio faster than the Beatles could fill the radio stations. The last noise Crystal made as a human was a multi-pitch scream, half of an extreme frustration and half of a very confused sort of terror. But Crystal wouldn't want it described that way, as two separate halves. She'd probably say it was just the anger.


	2. Ronette

Ronette liked stories – probably because she saw herself as the protagonist of one. Specifically, she saw herself as the main character in a rags-to-riches story. She was a social type who loved helping others – because she knew that what you do always comes back to you. It was her who really glued the Urchins together and made them a cohesive trio. Ronette gave her friends advice whenever she thought they could use it – she was the one who encouraged Audrey and Seymour to use the Audrey II as a selling point in the first place, so she was at least indirectly responsible for her shot at fame. She even tried to get Audrey to dump her asshole of a boyfriend, although she didn't listen. But even that worked out in the end.

When Skid Row became a national center of botanical industry, Ronette took full advantage of the situation. She took as many part-time jobs as she could, and encouraged Crystal and Chiffon to do the same. When Mushnik's was hiring, all three of them signed up, because Ronette understood exactly what a huge opportunity it was. They acted as the shop's main messengers from that point on, organizing all of the shop's business offers and facilitating communication between their people and Mushnik – or Seymour, once Mr. Mushnik took an extended leave to visit his niece (or was it his cousin?) in Czechoslovakia. They even wrote the theme song to Seymour Krelborn's Gardening Tips - "The Meek Shall Inherit". It was a really personal song for Ronette, and on top of that, it was free advertising for her ever-more-popular-by-the-minute girl group, the Urchins. The damn dentist finally disappeared, and Ronette was overjoyed to see Seymour and Audrey finally hook up. But it got Ronette thinking. Seymour and Audrey were the perfect couple, but she was still the main character. So shouldn't she have a romantic plot? She decided that that was the purpose of Seymour and Audrey's relationship. Inspiration. But what exactly was she inspired to?

Then, one day, Ronette got a letter in the mail. It was from one Patrick Martin, Licensing and Marketing Division, World Botanical Enterprises. It wasn't addressed to her; it was addressed to the shop's business team. That happened to be her. Now, this wasn't by any measure the only letter of this sort that she'd gotten, but it was one of the few to come with a photograph of the person sending it. She could tell from that photograph that he wasn't like the rest of the businessmen, old and unpleasant and soulless. He was handsome, and (relatively) young, and well-off, and even if he was older than her, it wasn't by all that much. Maybe it was just because she was looking for her man, but this looked like her man. Ronette responded to Mr. Martin by mail as a representative of Mushnik And Son, but she met him personally. She flirted a little, tried to get to know him. He was interested in her, too! And he had really ambitious plans involving the Audrey Two. A happy ending to Ronette's story was finally approaching.

But it never came. According to Patrick, Seymour wound up selling Mushnik and Son to World Botanical Enterprises so that he could live with Audrey somewhere else. Something seemed fishy about that story, especially seeing as Ronette never saw Seymour or Audrey after that. And in the preceding days, Seymour was always on the verge of a panic attack. Seymour apparently dropped out of his television show, too, and Ronette had to quickly come up with a new theme song for Patrick Martin's Gardening Tips. Ronette wasn't sure what to make of the situation with Seymour and Audrey, but she tried to ignore it, so she could live her life with Patrick. But that turned bad. It slowly became clear that he cared about her as an affair, not as a person – he hid things from her, and called her nasty things, and tried to control her. But she tried to ignore that, too. She was in the same situation that she had tried to get Audrey out of. But it's harder to notice it when it's happening to you, and it's harder to take action than to suggest action.

Rumors started spreading that the Audrey Twos were something straight out of Lovecraft, but she didn't let herself believe any of them. But then, they broke into the studio and killed Crystal while she was in the middle of one of her tantrums, and she couldn't stay in denial any longer, and Patrick knew it. Crystal's death didn't just leave a musical hole in the Urchins, it left an emotional hole in Ronette. She expressed all of her doubts and concerns to him, but he hushed her, and told her to continue to play her part as someone who had no idea what was going on. He told her secrets that she had to hide. Nasty secrets. Secrets about the Audrey Twos. Secrets about Seymour. Secrets about himself. Ronette helped hide those secrets, as the powerless queen of the world for a few short weeks as the world started to end. That's how she wound up quietly contemplating her life in Patrick Martin's arms in his office. And that's why she was the only thing between him and the mad-as-hell protester who burst into his office, screaming about devil plants bringing about the apocalypse. As the man whipped out his automatic, she screamed for Patrick Martin to look out. She took a bullet for him.

The man had more bullets.


	3. Chiffon

Chiffon cried, but nobody hears you crying when you're alone in a nuclear bunker. More importantly, nobody hears you crying when everybody's dead. She hadn't seen another person in months. She'd seen plenty of plants, though. But she even saw less and less of those as time went on – they'd run out of people to sustain themselves with. She wondered if she should even feel lucky that none of the plants could break through reinforced concrete. Crystal was gone – plants. Ronette was gone – crazed man. Chiffon had personally seen to it that he didn't get to burn the body. She clutched the little revolver that she'd been told Seymour left for her, and her grip on it tightened and loosened in sync with her heavy breath. It was completely useless – plants are bulletproof by the time they get big enough to care about, and people – Chiffon couldn't bring herself to kill someone. She'd always been the more quiet, anxious, nervous one, even if she did manage to hide it when performing in public as part of the Urchins. That made her think back to how she got here.

Part of her shyness was just something about her personality – she'd been quiet since she was a little girl. So they always gave her the more sedate solos – she wasn't the lead singer on "Ya Never Know", after all, she was the lead singer on "A Little Dental Music". But she had reasons for her introversion besides her inherent nature. She wasn't quite like the other girls. Her distaste for Orin was a little purer than the distaste that Crystal and Ronette had for him, because she had zero physical attraction to him. But on the other hand, when she'd talked with Audrey, back when Audrey was around, she always got the most wonderful feeling, the most nauseating feeling, and she was addicted to that feeling, but she also suppressed it. When Seymour and Audrey got together, Crystal and Ronette were simply happy for her, and happy for him. Chiffon was happy for both of them, too, and outwardly, that was all that she was. But she was secretly consumed by envy of Seymour. There were things that could happen on Skid Row between girls like Chiffon, and she'd dreamed of those things happening with her and Audrey. But she knew, now more than ever, that that couldn't be. Maybe she shouldn't have let her hopes get so high in the first place. There were things that could happen on Skid Row to girls like Chiffon, bad things. It was fall of 1960, and the world wasn't ready. The world was violently not ready. Still, over the week when Seymour and Audrey were dating but still living in Skid Row, Chiffon pulled Audrey away from Seymour to talk with her noticeably often – further decreasing the time that Audrey could spend with Seymour, which was already short since he was busy all of the time listening to the pitches of businessmen. It made her feel guilty, to take time away from other people's happiness, at least a little bit out of spite, but she was too conflicted to stop herself.

Then, mid-December, Audrey disappeared, and Seymour disappeared, and Chiffon went looking for them a few times in the following weeks but could never get any solid answers on where they went. Ronette started spending more and more of her time with some man who made Chiffon uncomfortable, and Crystal was starting to crack under the pressure of hitting it big. And then the plants killed Crystal and started killing the world and Ronette didn't care. She didn't really even talk to Chiffon any more; she was spending all of her time with that awful man. Phil Spector found some girl to replace Crystal, but the Urchins were never the same after that, and it was pointless anyways because civilization was unraveling. A while after the Rose Bowl incident where the Audrey Two's nature became obvious, Ronette was shot in the arms of her man, and Chiffon had been on the run ever since, with nothing driving her to live accept her fear of death. It was time to be brave, now. She could wait for the remaining plants to die of starvation, or leave for another planet, or whatever they do, and be one of the founders of whatever new civilization arises – if a new civilization arises. But Chiffon didn't want to repopulate. She wondered if she should feel guilty for that, but she brushed that thought aside as a product of her culture's attempts to manipulate her. She opened the bunker door, so that she would at least be helping something. She prayed, put the gun in her mouth, and, before she could have another full nervous breakdown, she squeezed the trigger.

* * *

"Crystal! Chiffon! There you are. Maybe we're plants, now, but I don't think we should be like the others. We-"


End file.
